The unwelcome workaround for Nvidia's RTX 50-series black screen issues is to hobble your gaming monitor with a 60 Hz refresh rate

MSI RTX 5090 Suprim in an open test bench

(Image credit: Future)

During all of my initial review testing and overclocking of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards, I had no issues with the black screening problem that we've seen cropping up in various forums and Reddit threads. My Founders Edition cards have worked beautifully and not once set fire to the wooden cabin tinderbox in which I do all my performance testing.

But today I hit a wall. That is how I am going to refer to the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim, a wall, because boy, that thing is chonk with a capital OMG.

This is my first third-party RTX 50-series card, and it is towering over my test rig right now, and kinda terrorising it, if truth be told. Because now, I too, have fallen victim to the black screen effect we've read about. Nvidia has said it is investigating the issue but hasn't been able to help me through the struggles with the card.

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But I have found a solution… in part. But it's not a solution I would want to live with, just something that I could put up with until Nvidia comes out with a proper fix which stops this $2,700 card from blacking out when it's put under pressure.

Basically, you have to hobble your high refresh rate monitor. Thanks Reddit.

It's horrible, and I don't want to have to do it, but this way I'm able to get Cyberpunk 2077 or DaVinci Resolve to run without crashing my entire rig, and the only way I've managed to get through most of our GPU benchmarking suite is by dropping my glorious 4K 240 Hz OLED monitor down to a lowly 60 Hz refresh.

It's still not allowed me to get through a full 3DMark Time Spy run, but you can't have everything. Even if you spend this much on a brand new graphics card, it seems.

Let me count the other things I tried that have failed:

As always, I used Display Driver Uninstaller to clean my old drivers for a fresh start
Rolled back, clean uninstall, and installed the pre-released drivers Nvidia supplied for the review
Tried both MSI's 'Silent' and 'Gaming' BIOS settings
Used different power cables
Plugged it in and out of the PCAT power testing module
Reseated the RAM (always worth a try)
Swapping between HDMI and DP cables
Changed Nvidia Control Panel power modes
Left the room while I booted 3DMark (it used to work with games on tape with the Commodore 64)
Tried 120 Hz 😭

Peak Storage

SATA, NVMe M.2, and PCIe SSDs on blue background — (Image credit: Future)

Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.
Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.
Best external hard drives: Huge capacities for less.
Best external SSDs: Plug-in storage upgrades.

It is worth noting that I have so far only tested the card on the PCG GPU test rig. This is the one which has had zero issues with the other RTX 50-series cards, on indeed any graphics card I've tested in the past 12 months.

But it is the one which did give me horrendous coil whine on the RTX 5090 Founders Edition, so I will be switching machines now I have completed testing on this overclocked MSI card to see if it works within another PC.

But yes, there you have it, run your monitor like it's 2007 and you can at least play some games on your RTX 50-series GPU.

You're welcome.

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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.